The "Middle East and Terrorism" Blog was created in order to supply information about the implication of Arab countries and Iran in terrorism all over the world. Most of the articles in the blog are the result of objective scientific research or articles written by senior journalists.

From the Ethics of the Fathers: "He [Rabbi Tarfon] used to say, it is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but you are not exempt from undertaking it."

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Friday, September 13, 2013

Read the article in Italiano (translated by Yehudit Weisz, edited by Angelo Pezzana)Read the article in en Español (translated by Shula Hamilton)Read the article in en Français (translated by Danilette)

These days, the Arab media are full of reports about diplomatic activities regarding the Syrian issue, and commentators' articles dealing with this matter fill whole pages in the newspapers of the Arab world. They all try to ascertain if there will be an American military action, what its scope will be, how powerful it will be, what its goals will be, how long it will last, and especially, what the consequences of the action will be. But there is one important voice which is almost not heard at all in this whole chorus of analysts - the Saudi voice - and it seems that someone there - the king? - may have imposed a gag order on the commentators.
To get a deeper understanding of the reason for this, I contacted a Saudi colleague, with whom I am in contact occasionally. He is a member of the royal family, but is not in the inner circles of decision making. Nevertheless, he is well acquainted with the way the Saudi leaders think, he is aware of the considerations and feelings that drive it and has a deep understanding of what is said and what is not said there. At first he refused to speak, and only after a "preliminary conversation" did he consent. This is how it is in the Middle East: everything is based on personal relationships, and Arabic is the entry bridge into the emotions of the region's people.
He preferred to speak about "The Gulf", not Saudi Arabia, in order to present a united front regarding the events in Syria and its environs. This is not exactly correct, because the positions of Saudi Arabia (which is the main supplier and supporter of the Salafi fighters in Syria) and those of Qatar (which stand behind the Free Syrian Army), are not identical, and the United Arab Emirates is much more active than Oman. But despite the differences in approach among the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, their basic attitudes are very similar.
My colleague hinted at an important aspect of Middle Eastern character, which is "murou'a" - "manliness". A man will always be sure to act according to rules of manly conduct, and will make every effort to avoid feminine patterns of behavior. Emotionality and whining are considered feminine qualities that express weakness, while a male is expected to keep a cool head and emotional balance and remain calm and functional even in difficult and complex situations. It seems that the Saudi government's silence during the last few days stems from this characteristic. One could say that the greater the internal emotional stress, the quieter and more relaxed the Arab man will try to appear. It relates to the obsession with honor, because if a man sounds like a woman he is considered contemptible.
The longer the conversation continued, the more open it became, and the more my colleague complained about the Western world in general and the United States in particular. "You (he included Israel in the Western world) speak all the time about human rights, so why are you quiet about what is happening in Syria? After chemical weapons have been used ten times, you still do not manage to find a reason to eliminate Asad? Are two hundred thousand fatalities not enough to bring you out of your complacency? Is issuing condemnations the only thing you can do? Making threats without carrying them out? You have all of the proof you need to do what you said you would do, so why are you not doing what you promised?" And then came the knockout question: "Is the Libyan's blood redder than the Syrians'? Or maybe Libyan oil is blacker than Syrian oil?" These things were said somewhat scornfully, because the coalition of Europe and America attacked Qadhaffi for less terrible things than Asad is doing.
I asked him: "So how should the Arab world deal with a mass murderer?" He answered with a rhetorical question: "Don't you know what Saudi Arabia has done and is still doing for the Syrian people?" He was referring to what Saudi Arabia usually does: it gives money, lots of money, for purposes that it believes in. Saudi Arabia - and all of the other Gulf countries - have poured many billions of dollars into the Syrian rebellion to pay the fighters, to buy weapons, ammunition, communication devices and civilian aid, and even to bring women to Syria in order to "serve" the fighters. Saudi Arabia funds training camps in other countries that train fighters to join the fight against Asad in Syria.
The Saudi activities are what put Asad into the military and emotional state where he felt that he had to use a doomsday weapon, a chemical weapon. And if it hadn't been used on August 21st, Damascus would have been conquered by trained, armed and equipped troops who came in from a neighboring country after Saudi Arabia had participated in funding their training, and they situated themselves the night before August 21 in the Eastern suburbs of Damascus. Asad understood that if he did not destroy these troops with gas - together with the citizens that the troops were hiding among, using them as human shields - the troops would take control of the government institutions in Damascus and his rule would come to an end, along with himself.
The Saudis were on the brink of victory, and Asad's use of gas took it away from them. That's why they are so angry with Asad, and with the West as well, which did not take the necessary steps immediately, to act without discussions, without votes, without Congress and without Parliament. They are concerned that Obama never intended to act in Syria, and all of his fiery speeches about red lines and what would happen if those red lines were crossed, were only words, which he had no intention of carrying out. My colleague used the expression "the roar of a mouse" to describe Obama's words.
But the Saudis cannot attack Obama personally, because they still depend on him to deal with the great, real, serious threat to their east, Iran. They heard the words of the "moderate", "reformist" (my colleague laughed when he said these words) Iranian president very well when he said this week that Iran will not give up one iota of its nuclear rights. He attributes this declaration to the West's weak behavior in the Syrian issue. He used an Arabic expression meaning that Iran completely ignores the United States.

He doesn't believe that Asad will give up his chemical weapons, and he will do any sort of trick in order to conceal them and hide what he has in his stockpiles of death. The Russians have won a big victory over the United States, and they are taking advantage of Europe's lack of will to use force. And in general, what is all this business about giving up chemical weapons? Can a murderer's punishment be mitigated by confiscating the pistol that he used to commit murder? What kind of ethical or legal standard is that? Why don't they even issue an international arrest warrant against al-Assad to bring him to justice in the International Criminal Court? How is he different from Omar al-Bashir of Sudan and Milosevic of Yugoslavia?
According to my Saudi colleague, Iran is the big winner in the whole Syrian fiasco. Iran is reaping the fruits of its success in Iraq, because of the thousands of Americans that Iran killed in Iraq between the years 2003 and 2010, which will deter the United States from becoming involved in Syria. This is how Iran has acquired Iraq - where Iran now has unlimited control - and Syria. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards fight on Asad's side in Syria, despite it being a violation of Security Council resolutions, and no country does a thing.
The ruling family of Saudi Arabia is concerned, very concerned, that the weakness that the West conveys regarding Syria today will also be reflected in the way the West relates to Iran, and that if Iran takes some action against Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf countries in the future, the West will not have the strength and the courage to emerge from its impassivity and support Saudi Arabia on the day of reckoning. The Saudis are tense and concerned, and this is the reason for the quiet from Saudi Arabia during these trying days.
It may be that in the Middle East there are more countries whose leaders are quite concerned about the future of the Middle East and the world in general.

Dr. Mordechai Kedar(Mordechai.Kedar@biu.ac.il) is an Israeli scholar of Arabic and Islam, a lecturer at Bar-Ilan University and the director of the Center for the Study of the Middle East and Islam (under formation), Bar Ilan University, Israel. He specializes in Islamic ideology and movements, the political discourse of Arab countries, the Arabic mass media, and the Syrian domestic arena.

Translated from Hebrew by Sally Zahav with permission from the author.

Source: The article is published in the framework of the Center for the Study of the Middle East and Islam (under formation), Bar Ilan University, Israel. Also published in Makor Rishon, a Hebrew weekly newspaper.

What better time is there to
develop an even more voracious appetite than the very moment when the
only people likely to stand up to you are too busily engaged in
self-pity to notice your whirring centrifuges?

What does it mean for a nation to be "tired of war"? Those were the
words that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry used the in a major
statement on Syria a fortnight ago and they were reiterated this week by
President Barack Obama.

"Now, we know that after a decade of conflict, the American people
are tired of war," Secretary Kerry said. He added, "Believe me, I am
too." These are odd words to use in front of the international media.,
especially when you know that not only your allies and friends but all
your foes -- including your most intransigent ones -- will be watching.
What does it signal when the world's sole superpower expresses itself in
such terms?

There can be little doubt that the train of thought Secretary Kerry
expressed is part of the unfortunate zeitgeist. Everywhere in the West
there is a sense that the last decade has been wearying. This may not
matter all that much if you happen to be an exhausted Belgian or Swede:
terrible for you, no doubt, but unlikely to have any wider consequence.
What is concerning is when the only country in the world that really
matters begins to feel and express itself in such a way.

U.S.
Secretary of State John Kerry and French Foreign Minister Laurent
Fabius discuss Syria during a news conference in Paris, on September 7,
2013. [State Department photo/ Public Domain]

Countless historians and analysts of all political inclinations have
pointed out that the sole superpower is going through something like the
syndrome it went through after the war in Vietnam. There is something
in this. But for all the similarities people can point to between
post-Vietnam syndrome and post-Iraq/Afghanistan syndrome, the
differences cry out to be considered.

Firstly this: that during the war in Vietnam, America lost almost
60,000 of her service personnel. During the decade of engagement in Iraq
and Afghanistan, US troop casualties came to almost a tenth of that
figure. What is even more striking is that during the Vietnam war the US
army was a conscript army, drawn from across the country, classes and
professions, whereas Iraq and Afghanistan were operations carried out
solely by a professional, volunteer army.

This is a vast difference. A conscript army by definition affects
every community, family and household in a country. Whereas volunteer
armies tend to be dominated by people from particular areas, backgrounds
and levels of income. So when somebody after the Vietnam conflict said
they were "tired of war," they could easily have been speaking with real
experience -- as Secretary Kerry, a veteran of the conflict, might have
done. Most households were affected in some way.

But when someone today says he is "tired of war," let alone when a
whole society says it is 'tired of war," what many -- if not most -- of
these people mean is that they are fed of up reading about it every day.
Or fed up with all that war stuff clogging up their television
schedules.

A study done in the UK several years ago revealed an all-time low in
the number of people in Britain who actually know anybody involved in
the armed forces. The figure was almost in single digits. In other
words, in vast expanses of the country there is nobody who knows anybody
in the armed forces. I strongly suspect that the same findings could
today be discovered in the U.S. Vast swathes of people, on the coasts
and elsewhere, will be able to get through an average year while having
no contact whatsoever with anybody actually serving their nation abroad.

Under such conditions there is something profoundly decadent about
any such country, or its leadership, saying seriously that they are
"tired" of war. Yet these were exactly the terms in which the U.S.
sought to address to the nation over the question of involvement in
Syria on the eve of this year's anniversary of 9/11: President Obama
acknowledged that the nation was "sick and tired of war." He quoted this
phrase, and another from someone writing to him who said that the
nation was "still recovering from our involvement in Iraq."

Yet it wasn't all downbeat. The President tried to rally the nation
by saying that "the burdens of leadership are often heavy, but the world
is a better place because we have borne them." He then stressed that
the nation was not, in fact, going to have to bear them. If he were
inclined at any point to do something about Syria, it would be something
"small," as Secretary Kerry also put it. No boots on the ground. No
heavier involvement. Yet somehow not "pinpricks" either.

All of which is unlikely to make Assad tremble. But it hardly matters
whether Assad trembles. What matters is what the other players in the
region and the wider world make of all this. What matters is what
Russia, China, and -- most pertinently -- Iran, will make of it. Iran
has managed to keep off the front pages of world attention lately by the
happy congruence of two circumstances: the election of a
pseudo-moderate president, and the ongoing international dithering about
what, if anything, to do about Syria. As it happens, Iran has already
dipped its leg into the water of Syria by sending its proxy armies into
the country. From their point of view, the reception could hardly have
been more pleasing: they have managed to act without consequences.

There are many questions over what to do in Syria, and many questions
over what is, or is not, effective to do. That debate should go on. But
what should not go on is a period of intense naval-gazing by the
Western powers. After all, what better time is there to develop an even
more voracious appetite than the very moment when the only people
likely to stand up to you are too busily engaged in self-pity to notice
your whirring centrifuges?

Speaking at the Israeli Navy graduation ceremony Wednesday, Peres
said, “Assad cannot be trusted to honor the agreement” but expressed
optimism that Washington and Moscow could impose conditions on the
Syrian president that would force him to give up his chemical weapons.

“I know both President Obama and President Putin and I am convinced
that if an agreement is reached it will be reliable, explicit and
significant. The agreement must ensure that Assad has no chemical
weapons,” he said.

A Congressional vote on whether or not the U.S. should strike Syria
militarily in response to the chemical weapons attack it carried out in
late August was postponed earlier this week after Russia, which has
backed the Assad regime in its more-than two-year-old civil war, proposed a solution whereby Syria would relinquish control of it chemical weapons arsenal.Zach PontzSource: http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/09/11/israeli-president-peres-assad-cannot-be-trusted-to-honor-agreement-on-chemical-weapons/Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Hamas faces two options: either
to initiate a new confrontation with Israel to create Arab and Islamic
pressure on Egypt to halt its war, or to confront the Egyptian army in a
direct military engagement by joining forces with the jihadis in Sinai.

For the past two months, the Egyptians have been at war not only with
the jihadis in Sinai, but also in an all-out war with the Palestinian
Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip.

This war is being waged on two fronts: in the media and along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt.

As far as Hamas is concerned, this is a war of survival that it cannot afford to lose.

An Egyptian army watchtower at Rafah, along the Gaza Strip border with Egypt, April 2009. (Photo credit: Marius Arnesen)

The Egyptian war is clearly hurting Hamas much more than the two
military offensives launched by the Israel Defense Forces in the Gaza
Strip since 2008.

Hamas officials in the Gaza Strip are now talking openly about the
Egyptian war, which they believe is aimed at toppling their regime
there.

The officials admit that they were not prepared for this war from the
largest Arab country, which until last June was their main ally in the
Arab and Islamic countries.

Since the ouster of Egypt's President Mohamed Morsi, the
state-controlled media in Egypt has turned Hamas into the country's
number one enemy.

Almost every day an Egyptian newspaper runs a story about Hamas's
ongoing attempts to undermine Egypt's national security, and its
involvement in terror attacks against the Egyptian army.

Hamas spokesmen in the Gaza Strip now spend most of their time
denying the allegations and accusing the Egyptian media of waging a
smear campaign not only against their movement,but all Palestinians.

The media offensive has been accompanied by a series of security
measures that have convinced Hamas leaders they are in a state of war
with Egypt.

Apart from banning Hamas representatives from entering Egypt, the
Egyptian authorities have imposed severe travel restrictions on
residents of the Gaza Strip.

The Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt has been shut for
most of the time over the past two months, with the Egyptian authorities
citing "security reasons" for the closure.

But the most drastic measure taken by the Egyptians so far, which is
really hurting Hamas, is the destruction of hundreds of smuggling
tunnels along the border with the Gaza Strip.

The Egyptians are now in the process of creating a buffer zone
between the Gaza Strip and Egypt after having razed several homes and
leveled land along the border.

These are the same Egyptians who used to condemn Israel for every
military strike aimed at thwarting rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip
against Israeli cities and towns.

All these measures have prompted some Hamas officials to wonder
whether Egypt was planning to launch a military operation inside the
Gaza Strip under the pretext of combating terror.

Hamas believes that as part of this war, Egyptian intelligence
officials are behind a new group called Tamarod [Rebellion] whose
members have vowed to overthrow the Hamas regime in November. In recent
weeks, Hamas arrested dozens of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip on
suspicion of being involved with the new group, which carries the same
name as the Egyptian movement that campaigned against Morsi.

The Egyptian security measures have thus far resulted in a severe
shortage of basic goods and fuel in the Gaza Strip. Some Hamas leaders
warned this week that the Gaza Strip is facing a humanitarian and
economic crisis as a result of the Egyptian army's measures.

Until recently, Hamas leaders were careful not to engage in a direct
confrontation with the new rulers of Egypt. But in recent days several
Hamas officials are beginning to regard Egypt's security measures as an
act of war against the Gaza Strip.

For now, the Egyptians do not want to admit that they are at war with
Hamas, preferring instead to describe their measures as part of a
campaign against terror. Hamas, for its part, has internalized the fact
that it is at war with Egypt.

Hamas, as it is being pushed to the wall and increasingly isolated,
faces two options: either to initiate a new confrontation with Israel to
create Arab and Islamic pressure on Egypt to halt its war, or to
confront the Egyptian army in a direct military engagement by joining
forces with the jihadis in Sinai.

Lashawn
Marten was playing chess when he announced, “I hate white people.” Then
he began hitting random white people who were walking by. By the time
he was done, several were wounded and one lay dead.

I have walked by countless times and seen the chess players sitting
near the overhang of the Union Square subway entrance; mostly black men
daring white passerby into a money game. At the fountain to the left,
Moonies squat on a blanket and sing their sonorous chants. To the right,
the remnants of Occupy Wall Street set up tables to collect money and
dispense buttons.

In warmer weather, break dancers perform on the stairs and office
workers sit beneath the statue of George Washington expelling the
British and eat lunch. Elderly Puerto Rican men push makeshift wooden
carts piled with unlabeled bottles of homebrewed soda pop.

Jeffrey Babbitt, the man Lashawn beat to death, looks familiar to me
because he has that type of New York face that you pass on the street.
You see it worn by plumbers and high school teachers. It’s the badge of
the vanishing New York City working class.

No conclusions will be drawn from the murder. Lashawn Marten was
obviously mentally ill. And if his mental illness took the form of
violent racism toward white people, that is an incidental fact. The
murder is an incident. The details are incidental. No conclusions will
be drawn from what happened between the chess tables.

Incidents take place all around us, but patterns have to be
articulated. The incident is insignificant. It’s the pattern that
counts.

The incident is something we have to learn to get over so we can get
back to shopping in downtown Manhattan or walking through Union Square.
The pattern is a social problem that we must dedicate ourselves to
fighting. The incident isn’t supposed to define our lives. The pattern
is.

The murder of Chris Lane was an incident. The murder of Jeffrey Babbitt was an incident.

The Boston Marathon bombing was an incident. So was the Fort Hood
Massacre. So was 9/11. No conclusions can be drawn from them and no
pattern can be used to tie them together. They are to be processed
separately and discarded as having no further meaning than the private
pain of their victims.

The media is not that concerned with suppressing incidents. It is
concerned with suppressing pattern awareness. No one can deny that the
occasional racial murder takes place and that the perpetrators look like
Obama’s sons. And no one can deny that Muslims sometimes set off bombs
or fly planes into buildings. They deny only that these incidents form a
pattern.

Every Muslim terrorist attack is met with media chatter about an
Islamophobic backlash. The backlash never materializes, but it doesn’t
need to. The mere repetition of it does the trick and sets the pattern.
It tells readers that the attack is the incident, but the backlash is
the pattern.

The attack is only an incident and not characteristic of Muslims
while the backlash is a pattern and characteristic of our bigotry and
intolerance.

White racism is a pattern. Black racism is an incident. Racism is
characteristic of white people, but not of black people. The crowds
passing through Union Square are subdivided into the oppressors and the
oppressed. Their lives are color coded for morality and justice. Jeffrey
Babbitt, who dreamed of being a motorman, loved comics and took care of
his elderly mother, was an oppressor. His death is an incident that in
no way detracts from the pervasive pattern of white racism.

Jeffrey Babbitt was an oppressor and Lashawn Marten was one of the
oppressed. This social dynamic was imposed on them at birth. The
occasional death of an oppressor in no way alters the fixed pattern of
the oppressors and the oppressed.

The pattern of American intolerance is likewise unmoved by September
11 or by two Chechens who set off a bomb near an 8-year-old. The blood
and ashes of 3,000 dead is nothing but a stain on the liberal pattern.
More people die of cancer or in car accidents, the liberal can always
answer. Numbers alone do not make a pattern. And if the pattern is not
recognized, then it does not exist.

We live in this world of unreal patterns and real lives where inexplicable things happen all the time.

Overhead, I see two beams of pale light piercing the sky and
reflecting at an angle. The towers of light remind us of an incident.
Not a pattern. After over a decade of war, no one in authority will
admit what we are fighting or why. All that ash and rubble, the twisted
steel and the falling bodies, are not part of a pattern. But when a
Muslim cabbie is stabbed by a drunk, that is a pattern.

Most of us see the real patterns, even if only hazily, like the beams
of light cutting across the sky. And we see that the unreal patterns,
the obsessions with Muslim backlashes and the martyrdom of Trayvon
Martin, are unreal things. Not true patterns, but false patterns that
reflect at an angle from the true light.

We do not speak of these true patterns. But we know them. They stir in us when the right moment appears. They keep us alive.

Millions walk through life with this double vision, the lenses of
their minds blurring the real and the unreal, paying lip service to the
grave threat that someone will spray paint a mosque while nervously
studying the Muslim sitting in the seat in front of them or voting for
Obama but moving out to the suburbs.

Patterns are power. The pattern-makers and pattern-dealers derive
theirs from being able to dictate the problem and the solution. They are
determined to understand things for us so that we will see the same
patterns that they do. They know all too well that if we stop seeing
their patterns, their cause and their power will die.

For now it is men like Jeffrey Babbitt or the spectators in the
Boston Marathon and the soldiers at Fort Hood who die. They die caught
in an invisible pattern that they cannot see.

We live in a world of phony patterns, of global environmental
apocalypses made to order, of shadows and illusions, of phantom fears,
panics and doubts. But even in the liberal world of ghosts and shadows,
where rogue air conditioners and cow flatulence are a greater threat to
the planet than the nuclear bomb, where Lashawn Marten was oppressed by
the unconscious white privilege of Jeffrey Babbitt who died for what he
did not even know he had and where Muslim terrorism is a phantom fear of
bigots, these true patterns intrude.

Terrible acts of violence momentarily tear apart the illusory false patterns with blood and fire and reveal the terrible truth.

On September 11, thousands of New Yorkers standing at Union Square
looked downtown to see a plume of smoke rising over Broadway. I was one
of them. Some fell to making anti-war posters on the spot. Others
enlisted in a long war. On another distant September, some New Yorkers
came to the defense of a 62-year-old man being beaten to death for the
color of his skin. Others walked on to the farmers’ market, bought their
organic peaches while the liberal memes in their heads told them to see
no evil.

Our lives are sharpest and clearest when we see the pattern. In
moments of revelation, the comforting illusions are torn away and the
true pattern of our world stands revealed.

by Daniel PipesThe Obama administration's diplomatic acrobatic over Syria of the
past three weeks prove that the president and his team are in way over
their heads, amateurs in the deadly game of war and peace. (One wonders
if Valerie Jarrett is making the key decisions in this instance, as in
so many others.)

Notice a difference? The crowd greeting Obama in Berlin in 2008.

Lurching from self-imposed trap (the "red line" statement) to
self-inflicted crisis (the need for congressional approval), the
administration erodes the credibility of the U.S. government and
increases the dangers facing Americans. Enemies of the United States,
its allies, and modern civilization itself will take succor in this
ignominious performance and grow in strength.

That Obama seems driven to defend his own honor and credibility,
regardless of cost, makes this episode particularly troublesome. A great
country finds itself held hostage to the ego of a small man.

And the Berlin crowd for Obama in 2013.

In short, Americans are finally starting to see the consequences of
electing and re-electing arguable the worst politician in modern times
to inhabit the White House, consequences will only become more apparent
in the years ahead. (September 11, 2013)

It’s hard to believe now, but there actually was a time when I viewed journalism as a noble profession.

(I was very young.)

On Monday, Norwegian voters, by a convincing margin, turned out the socialists and opted for a new, non-socialist government. This was how the British daily the Independent – which is regarded in some circles as a serious paper – headlined the news:

“Norway election results: Anti-immigrant party with links to mass
murderer Anders Behring Breivik set to enter government under
Conservative leader Erna Solberg.”

Just below the headline, to underscore the most important part of the
message – namely, that the Progress Party has “links” to Breivik – were
two equally large pictures of Breivik, the murderer, and Siv Jensen,
the head of the Progress Party, which won 16.3 percent of the vote in
Monday’s parliamentary ballot. The Independent‘s reporter, Tony
Paterson, devoted a considerable chunk of his text to a recap of the
Breivik murders, and only several paragraphs into the piece did he make
it clear that the nature of Breivik’s “links” to the party was that he’d
supported it “in his youth,” but later turned away from it because it
wasn’t “militant enough.”That’s it.

Paterson also claimed that after the Breivik atrocities the Progress
Party had “toned down its radical anti-Islamic rhetoric” (as if
radicalism consisted in opposing, rather than imposing, things
like forced marriage and honor killing) and “tried to present itself as a
party of government” (as opposed to a party of what?).

“Polls,” Paterson wrote, “have shown that Progress appeals to one in seven of Norway’s voters.” Quick question: why cite polls whenthere was an election on Monday that tells you exactly how many Norwegian voters support the Progress Party!?

(And those voters did so, note well, in defiance of years of vicious,
concentrated effort by the Norwegian media and political establishment
to isolate the Progress Party and to brand its supporters as racists,
bigots, and – since 2011 – associates of a mass murderer.)

The Independent wasn’t the only international media outlet that seemed determined to make Breivik the face of the Progress Party. The New York Times worked him into the second sentence of itsarticle on the election results. So did Le Monde. Ditto the Toronto Globe and Mail, which perpetrated
this disgusting affirmation: “The Progress party, which once had among
its members Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in 2011 in a
gun and bomb attack targeting Labour, came third in Monday’s poll,
giving it a kingmaker role in coalition building.”

An NBC report did those newspapers one better, incorporating Breivik in its very first sentence. El Pais waited
till its second paragraph to mention Breivik, but ran its story under a
scare headline warning that the “ultra-right” Progress Party held the
key to Norway’s next government (a statement that seemed to wildly
contradict the claim, strenuously underscored throughout the story’s
opening paragraph, that the Progress Party was the day’s “big loser”).
Italy’s big paper, Corriere della Sera, went with the headline: “Vote shock in Norway: Breivik’s Party enters government.”

Meanwhile, next door in Sweden, Aftonbladetcolumnist
Katrine Kielos went easy on the Breivik angle, but could barely contain
her shock and disgust at the decision of the Norwegian electorate: “Who
ever said that politics was fair?” Apparently implying that Siv Jensen
was the second coming of Hitler, Kielos fulminated that it was “as if
World War II never happened. This in the country that hands out the
Nobel Peace Prize.”

And Britain’s Guardian, not to be outdone by its rival the Independent, hired a Norwegian sociology professor to pen a whole article – illustrated with a huge picture of Breivik – the only aim of which was to yoke the Progress Party to the insane killer.

The theme running through most of this coverage was clear: as a
survivor of Breivik’s shooting spree told Paterson, the Progress Party’s
“anti-immigrant rhetoric…will create a more hostile environment.”

Yes, hostile. We don’t want any hostility, do we? For, you see, under
socialist rule, Norway is one big lovefest. Take these examples:

* Earlier this month, Oslo imams and police officials went on a buddy-buddy “team-building” exercise to strengthen their (supposedly) already powerful bonds of mutual respect and trust. Aftenposten depicted
the whole thing as just plain adorable. (“Did you remember your
sneakers?” one imam was quoted as asking another.) Only a wet blanket – a
truly hostile type – would point out that this gaggle of clerics
included the likes of Mehtab Afsar, who has argued aggressively that Islam should be exempt from criticism, and Ghulam Sarwar, who in an interview earlier this year expanded
at length on his theory that negative images of Islam in the Western
media can be traced to the nefarious influence of “the Jews.”

* Just before the election, the Norwegian government announced its plan to cover
the salaries of 380 Somalian government officials. How magnanimous –
and how typical of the loving spirit of the Stoltenberg regime! Who but a
(yes) hostile observer would draw attention to the fact that Somalia is
governed according to sharia law?

* Then there’s the story of Ola Thune, head of the homicide division
at Norway’s National Criminal Investigation Service, who – as TV2
reported the other day – converted
to Islam at “a beautiful ceremony in an Oslo mosque” where Thune (now
known as Ola Amir) “pledged his allegiance to Allah in ringing Arabic.”
Who but the most unbearably hostile individual would question the wisdom
of having a Muslim convert at the highest level of Norway’s version of
the FBI?

Community! Solidarity! These are Labor Party’s very slogans; anybody
who’s paid the slightest bit of attention to the election campaign has
heard Stoltenberg repeat them dozens of times – and has seen them echoed
endlessly in the almost exclusively left-wing Norwegian media.

To be sure, when the subject shifts to Jews…well, consider the following.

In May, the proudly socialist Dagbladet ran a cartoon
that showed a baby lying on a table, screaming in pain and bleeding
profusely. While a rabbi sticks a giant fork in the infant’s head, the
hand of another person, presumably a mohel, holds something that
looks like a pair of hedge clippers, with which he’s just circumcised
the newborn. A woman holding what is apparently meant to be a copy of
the Hebrew Bible tells a cop: “Abuse? No, this is tradition! An
important part of our faith!” The cop, smiling, replies: “Faith? Oh,
well then it’s OK!” And another cop, also smiling and already halfway
out the door, says: “Sorry for the interruption.”

It was far from the first anti-Semitic cartoon to appear in a major
Norwegian newspaper. (Cartoons equating Jews with Nazis are a beloved
staple of the Norwegian press.) But this particular cartoon happened to
gain a degree of international attention, so much so that Dagbladet felt obliged to publish on its website an incredibly lame statement,
composed in English, in which it defended its decision to run the
cartoon, claimed to have “a long and consistent history of fighting
antisemitism” (ha!), and insisted that “religious sentiments, dogmas or
rituals cannot be exempt from criticism” – an argument that the same
newspaper has rejected time and time in regard to Islam, notably in the
case of the Danish Muhammed cartoons.

Indeed, Dagbladet, like other major Norwegian dailies, has consistently maintained that freedom of speech doesn’t
give one the right to offend the most cherished religious beliefs of
others. But by “others,” it means Muslims – not Jews. Among the latest
examples of the paper’s valiant struggle against anti-Semitism was an
August 26 editorial
headlined “The cancerous tumor that is spreading.” The message was
straightforward: all the troubles in the Middle East – Iran, Syria,
Egypt, Libya, you name it – can be attributed to “the mother of all
conflicts,” namely the one between Israel and Palestine. In other words,
it’s all Israel’s fault.

Such is the beautiful, hostility-free social harmony that’s being
threatened by the ascent of the Progress Party and Siv Jensen – a woman
who, over the years, has gotten into hot water for such insufferably
hostile activities as defending Israel’s right to exist, challenging the
Labor Party’s chummy contacts with Hamas, and giving the keynote speech
at a 2009 pro-Israel rally.

Then again, Stoltenberg and his socialist cronies will probably be back in power soon enough. Consider this: a new report
shows that about 50% of the country’s Third World immigrants support
Labor, while another 25% vote for the two parties on the far side of
Labor – the Socialist Left and the Reds (i.e., Communists). After the
new government takes control, any effort at significant immigration
reform by the Progress Party is likely to be heavily watered down (if
not killed outright) by other parties. Meaning thatnon-Westerners
will continue to flow into Norway – and that the socialists will stand a
better chance every day of being returned to power, so they can crush
the “hostile environment” created by the Progress Party and reboot the
left-wing, Islamophilic, anti-Semitic lovefest.

B’nai Brith Canada said on Wednesday that a law proposed in the
Canadian province of Quebec to ban all religious symbols, including
yarmulkes, turbans, burkas, hijabs and over-sized crosses, in public
sector workplaces is unconstitutional and that the Jewish human rights group would intervene legally if necessary to block the bill.

A
diagram from the charter of Quebec values illustrating banned religious
symbols for public employees. Photo: Screenshot /
www.nosvaleurs.gouv.qc.ca.

In a statement, B’nai Brith Canada said the proposal, sponsored by Parti Québécois,violates
the fundamental freedoms enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights
and the Quebec Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and “that it is
absolutely unacceptable” as it “​​discriminates against persons of faith
and transforms them into second class citizens.”

“We were pleased to see that the
Federal Government has indicated their preparedness to mount a
constitutional challenge. The League, with its proven record of
defending human rights, is prepared to intervene should it be
necessary,” said Allan Adel, National Chair of the League for Human Rights of B’nai Brith Canada.

Explaining the proposal, the minister in charge of the charter, Bernard Drainville, said, “If the state is neutral, those working for the state should be equally neutral,” Canada’s CBC News reported on Tuesday.

The
proposal would apply to judges, police, prosecutors, public daycare
workers, teachers, school employees, hospital workers and municipal
personnel, while elected members of the national assembly would not be subject to the regulations, CBC News said.

by IPT NewsHe is one of the nation's most visible academics, making frequent television appearances and speaking throughout the country as part of Tavis Smiley's speaker's bureau.Princeton University Professor Cornel West
also straddles a line in which he does not espouse conspiracy theories
about the 9/11 attacks, but he openly encourages those who do.

The latest example came Wednesday, when West addressed tens of people at what originally was billed as a "Million Muslim March" on the Washington Mall.

When asked directly, West acknowledges that Osama bin Laden "had
something to do" with the 9/11 attacks, but he stresses the need to
listen to the conspiracy theorists and keep an open mind.

West followed a parade of speakers pushing conspiracy theories that
the World Trade Center towers collapsed due to controlled explosions and
doubting that an airplane really crashed into the Pentagon.

One speaker represented Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth,
which also had an information table at the rally. Another, Sheila Casey,
was introduced as a journalist and activist. Casey laid out several
aspects of the 9/11 Truth movement, doubting that the twin towers
collapsed due to fire. "Fire," she noted, "burns up. Fire does not burn
down. Intelligent people should know this."

She repeatedly expressed disdain for the overwhelming majority of
Americans who believe al-Qaida was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
Yet, she seemed hurt by the reaction her ideas generate and oblivious to
the irony in her statement:

"Yet in the United States, in the year 2013 we find ourselves in the
absurd position of having almost all politicians, almost the entire
media – both mainstream and alternative – and most of the population
acting as if this fairy tale about 9/11 makes perfect sense. And making
fun of anyone who disagrees."

The 9/11 attacks have been thoroughly investigated. The hijackers were seen on video going through airport security lines. And West is correct in saying bin Laden admitted
being responsible. A good compendium of articles and videos explaining
why the buildings collapsed, and why the conspiracy theories are
baseless, can be seen here.

The rally was organized by the American Muslim Political Action Committee
(AMPAC). It promised a rally emphasizing "the lack of transparency and
questions plaguing 9/11, steady erosion of domestic civil liberties,
drone policy and the very dire effect of these on of plight of American
Muslims here at home, and Muslim communities globally in the scope of
U.S. imperialism, and the modern face of resistance to unmanned aerial
surveillance and warfare."

Another of West's fellow speakers ran for president as a candidate
with the American Freedom Party. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)
in 2009 described
the American Freedom Party as "initially established by racist Southern
California skinheads that aims to deport immigrants and return the
United States to white rule. The group is now led by a coterie of
prominent white nationalists, including corporate lawyer William D.
Johnson, virulent anti-Semite Kevin MacDonald and white nationalist
radio host James Edwards. David Duke's former right-hand man, Jamie Kelso, helps with organizing."

Among its stated positions: "The American Third Position exists to represent the political interests of White Americans."

Merlin Miller told Wednesday's rally that "the media is 100 percent
controlled. These tyrannical things that are taking place
internationally are not for the American people. They are for globalist
interests – international banking, multinational corporations, the state
of Israel. They are not for the American people."

When it came his turn to speak, West did not take issue with anything
said before him. Rather, he called it "a blessing to be here today …
let me tell you there's no other place I'd want to be than right here."

He never directly espoused the 9/11 Truth conspiracies, but he did offer support to those pushing the ideas.

"We are here because we want to stand for moral consistency and
ethical integrity," he said. "We want to follow the truth where ever it
goes and sometimes that makes it painful. It means you have to cut
against the grain. Some of you all were saying, 'Well, we wish we had a
million people.' And I said, 'It doesn't bother me. I'm not here for the
quantity of the population, I'm here for the quality of the message."

But the message from Wednesday's speakers was empty. If asked
directly, West acknowledges that Osama bin Laden took responsibility for
the 9/11 attacks, but does not rule out deeper conspiracies. In a video posted in 2011, he said "I do believe in listening to voices that often times are dissenting voices."

He was interviewed by Dan Joseph from the Media Research Center at Wednesday's rally.

Joseph: Do you believe personally that it was Muslims who attacked who attacked us on 9/11?
West: That's a good question.Dan Joseph: But not a hard question.West: From what I see, I think that certainly bin Laden said he did
it and had connections. And that provides some evidence, but I'm also
open to the conversation … But I think bin Laden had something to do
with it.

Wednesday's rally was small and inconsequential. West's presence,
however, gave it some star power. It is not clear why West enables this
fringe movement, especially when he seems to acknowledge they haven't
made their case. September 11 is a painful day for Americans, especially
for those who survived or lost loved ones. West chose poorly when he
agreed to spend it with people who believe al-Qaida terrorism , spelled
out in plain language, is "a fairy tale."